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This Intellectual-Principle, if the term is to convey the
truth, must be understood to be not a principle merely potential
and not one maturing from unintelligence to intelligence- that
would simply send us seeking, once more, a necessary prior- but a
principle which is intelligence in actuality and in eternity.
Now a principle whose wisdom is not borrowed must derive from
itself any intellection it may make; and anything it may possess
within itself it can hold only from itself: it follows that,
intellective by its own resource and upon its own content, it is
itself the very things on which its intellection acts.
For supposing its essence to be separable from its intellection
and the objects of its intellection to be not itself, then its
essence would be unintellectual; and it would be intellectual not
actually but potentially. The intellection and its object must
then be inseparable- however the habit induced by our conditions
may tempt us to distinguish, There too, the thinker from the
thought.
What then is its characteristic Act and what the intellection
which makes knower and known here identical?
Clearly, as authentic Intellection, it has authentic intellection
of the authentically existent, and establishes their existence.
Therefore it is the Authentic Beings.
Consider: It must perceive them either somewhere else or within
itself as its very self: the somewhere else is impossible- where
could that be?- they are therefore itself and the content of
itself.
Its objects certainly cannot be the things of sense, as people
think; no First could be of the sense-known order; for in things
of sense the Idea is but an image of the authentic, and every
Idea thus derivative and exiled traces back to that original and
is no more than an image of it.
Further, if the Intellectual-Principle is to be the maker of this
All, it cannot make by looking outside itself to what does not
yet exist. The Authentic Beings must, then, exist before this
All, no copies made on a model but themselves archetypes,
primals, and the essence of the Intellectual-Principle.
We may be told that Reason-Principles suffice [to the subsistence
of the All]: but then these, clearly, must be eternal; and if
eternal, if immune, then they must exist in an
Intellectual-Principle such as we have indicated, a principle
earlier than condition, than nature, than soul, than anything
whose existence is potential for contingent].
The Intellectual-Principle, therefore, is itself the authentic
existences, not a knower knowing them in some sphere foreign to
it. The Authentic Beings, thus, exist neither before nor after
it: it is the primal legislator to Being or, rather, is itself
the law of Being. Thus it is true that "Intellectual and Being
are identical"; in the immaterial the knowledge of the thing is
the thing. And this is the meaning of the dictum "I sought
myself," namely as one of the Beings: it also bears on
reminiscence.
For none of the Beings is outside the Intellectual-Principle or
in space; they remain for ever in themselves, accepting no
change, no decay, and by that are the authentically existent.
Things that arise and fall away draw on real being as something
to borrow from; they are not of the real; the true being is that
on which they draw.
It is by participation that the sense-known has the being we
ascribe to it; the underlying nature has taken its shape from
elsewhere; thus bronze and wood are shaped into what we see by
means of an image introduced by sculpture or carpentry; the craft
permeates the materials while remaining integrally apart from the
material and containing in itself the reality of statue or couch.
And it is so, of course, with all corporeal things.
This universe, characteristically participant in images, shows
how the image differs from the authentic beings: against the
variability of the one order, there stands the unchanging quality
of the other, self-situate, not needing space because having no
magnitude, holding an existent intellective and self-sufficing.
The body-kind seeks its endurance in another kind; the
Intellectual-Principle, sustaining by its marvellous Being, the
things which of themselves must fall, does not itself need to
look for a staying ground.
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